Search engines enable users with a tool that can be used to locate relevant information. For example, a search engine can be used to locate documents, web sites, and other files using keywords. Conventional search engines can also be used in attempts to locate users based on keywords to return user profile records having expertise fields constructed by the users associated with the returned profile records. In the conventional case, keywords can be used by a search engine to return information that may or may not be relevant to a user's intended search result. For example, using a profile store to locate one or more users having a certain area of or level of expertise can lead to biased results due in part to the subjective nature of personal profiles.
A biased evaluation of expertise usually occurs due to self-doctoring. For example a user might consider herself to be an expert on ‘Information Retrieval’ and update her Skills”, “Ask me about” etc. with ‘Information Retrieval.’ As a result, an individual may be considered as an expert by current search systems even though the individual has no collateral (documents, publications, etc.) to support such a claim. Additionally, current search systems tend to completely overlook authored documents when returning expertise information and provide little or no substantiating evidence to support the results returned. For example, a conventional search service returns a set of results with Hit-Highlighting over terms in a profile matching the user query. Such limited search capabilities provide overly constrained search results and lack promotion of user confidence in the search system or service.